Vmware on i5 13" MBP

I was wondering if any of you has ever used VMware to run linux on a MBP?

I'm gonna be starting school later on this month for a Network Administrator major, and I will need Lunix for one class. One of the advisors said that I can always "use VMWare Fusion and create a virtual machine for Linux"

Will the regular non retina 13" MBP work well for this purpose?
I'm thinking about maxing the ram to 8GB and also upgrading to a 1TB HDD.

Will you be running a graphical desktop on Linux? Do you know which distribution you will be using?

If you don't know the answers... then make sure you have at least 8GB. From an education usage standpoint, you probably won't be running stuff on your Mac at the same time as running high-utilization Linux stuff, so 8GB should be more than enough and will just make your Mac better all around. The VM files themselves won't take that much space depending on the distribution... for instance, you can get an XBMC-tailored distribution of Ubuntu in well under 4GB.

If Fusion isn't the required hypervisor, VirtualBox runs most Linuces quite well and is free.

Will you be running a graphical desktop on Linux? Do you know which distribution you will be using?

If you don't know the answers... then make sure you have at least 8GB. From an education usage standpoint, you probably won't be running stuff on your Mac at the same time as running high-utilization Linux stuff, so 8GB should be more than enough and will just make your Mac better all around. The VM files themselves won't take that much space depending on the distribution... for instance, you can get an XBMC-tailored distribution of Ubuntu in well under 4GB.

If Fusion isn't the required hypervisor, VirtualBox runs most Linuces quite well and is free.

(I keep several VMs on/available to my MBP, although it is an i7.)

Click to expand...

Most of the classes are about general networking such as port forwarding, routing protocols and network security. There are however, some Cisco classes along with a Linux (ITSC 1316) one. I don't think is going to be heavy on the processor so the i5 should do. What do you think?

They also offer "ITSC 1307 - Unix Operating System I " but not at my particular college. I understand that OS X is closely based on Unix?

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